One thing I think most people today would agree about
is that the Internet is having far-reaching effects on society, and at
this point in time, it’s difficult to predict the outcomes. Radio and
television required passivity. The Internet invites participation; it
promotes curiosity, conversation, and conviction. Social connectivity
makes ideological amplification easy, allowing like-minded people to get
together and venture further in the ideological direction they’re
already leaning than they would have ventured on their own.

Regardless of the sentiment, it can be amplified in
cyberspace. Any one of the above features of social media offers the
possibility of revolutionary change. The Internet, therefore, can bring
us together or rip us apart. Today’s communication upheaval can play to
our worst instincts or our best; how we respond is up to each of us as
citizens.

During the past half-century the media sources we
utilize have continued to dramatically affect the way we live.
Television, for example, has entertained and educated us for more than
sixty years, but in some respects it has had an anesthetizing effect.
It’s managed to distort our intelligence into a sort of semiconscious
stupor in which we can watch reruns over and over without recalling
having seen them before. In other words, millions of people use
television to relieve stress and tune out, so to speak, just as others
under the stress of modernity use drugs to turn their anxiety into
euphoria.

Contrast today’s communication capabilities with the
1950s, when there were only three television networks. The differences
are so profound that many young people today have difficulty imaging
what life would be like without constant connectivity.Millions of people used to go to work each day having watched the
same programs the night before as most of the people they worked with.
This shared sense of entertainment offered the feeling that we were
really in the same boat, minus the racial and gender biases prevalent at
the time. Social media may seem to have a similar effect today, except
that the groups are far more self-selecting and the subjects of interest
more trivial in nature. After all, how thoughtful and reflective can one
be when the expectation is to respond quickly in 140 characters or less?

If you had a message you wanted to communicate to the
general public in the 1950s, you were pretty much out of luck. Radio,
television, newspapers, magazines, and letters were about the only
options. Not so today. But when you start to imagine what the results
might be from turning those billions of hours of television stupor into
something more productive with today’s connectivity, the possibilities
are mind-bending. In Cognitive
Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky,
who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New YorkUniversity,
shows how using our heretofore dead-to-the-world time differently has
the potential to change the world. He describes interactive media as the
connective tissue that holds society together.

Shirky writes, “In a historical eyeblink, we have
gone from a world with two different models of media—public broadcasts
by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a
world where public and private media blend together, where professional
and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation
has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” Shirky also makes it clear
that we have always found the time to do what interests us and what we
really care about—the same realization that prompted me to write
September University.

As I make clear in that book,
the fall and winter of life is the optimum time to reflect on our
experience, to use that experience and our learning to achieve a
fulfilling end to life, and to do so with enough enthusiasm that we
leave something worthwhile behind. Regardless of whether you are
politically left, right, or center, what is important is to set contempt
and animosity aside and be willing to engage in a civil dialog with
people of opposing views while maintaining a resolve to opt for the
better argument.

Imagine what the Internet and all of the attendant
social media could and would support, if most people used its power to
find real solutions to real problems. What if more and more people were
to truly care about discovering the better argument, regardless of whose
side might appear to be winning? What if, instead of spending so much
time posting incendiary remarks about their ideological opposition,
people sent out positive messages seeking common ground? What if most
people began to act as if the way we act toward one another really
matters, and as if they believed we will get the future we deserve? What
if a significant number of people past middle age began to focus on
generativity and their legacy for the generations to follow?

I invite you to join the discussion and to visit the September
University
Facebook page and engage. Please invite others to do so as well, and
tell us how you planto make the best of the rest of your life.